The Real Reason McCain Will Be Hard To Beat
Paul Weyrich hits on the reason John McCain may be the next President of the United States; the irony is he’s a McCain opponent being quoted in an article about the perils of McCain moving right:
The camp that may be the hardest to woo is the social conservatives. In interviews, leaders speak of McCain in the harshest of terms, with no hope of redemption.
“Everybody understands, he hates the Christian right. That’s a real problem,” says Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation. Mr. Weyrich dismisses the Falwell speech invitation as just a “personal patchup.”
“He wants to remake the Republican Party into pre-Reagan times,” Weyrich continues. “Republicans traditionally stood for limited government, free enterprise, and a strong national defense. We added a fourth leg to that stool, which was traditional American values. And he wants to get rid of that.”
But Weyrich agrees that as long as the social conservatives don’t have a strong presidential hopeful of their own, it will be hard to “beat somebody with nobody.”
Hard to beat somebody with nobody…now, that’s not entirely fair to everyone else – Huckabee and Allen and company aren’t nobodies…but it points to the star power McCain’s rivals (with the exception, of course, of Rudy G.) will have to overcome…
Most of what you say is true, but one reality of national level politics is that things rarely stay the same. I think John McCain will either gain popularity and support, creating a momentum that will be difficult for any other Republican to stop, or he will slowly lose support, and open the door for another challenger. Given that one of his main support groups, the MSM, now see him as a threat to win the Presidency and deny the Democrats the White House, they have predictably turned on him. This will escalate as we near 2008–at least until it looks like George Allen or Huckabee, or someone like them might win the Presidency–in which case, McCain will become their darling once again. One reason rarely postulated for Giuliani’s relative quiet is that his advisors might realize that McCain is going to take a lot of flack right now. Why jump in and share it with him? There are many steps that can be taken quietly behind the scenes in preparation for a serious run in 2008. Rudy and his group may prefer to sit back a bit longer, and see how McCain handles some less-than-fawning scrutiny.
One of the reasons I’ve become extremely bearish on McCain can be found in Weyrich’s statement. Social cons are convinced that McCain would prefer a party without them, and no number of speeches at Christian universities will change that. Unlike Rudy, who social cons get along with despite disagreements on the issues, McCain isn’t somebody they disagree with, he’s somebody social cons don’t trust. As such, it will be about as difficult for McCain to get the nod as it was for Nelson Rockefeller back in the ’60s. What many people don’t know about 1964 is that it was supposed to be Rockefeller’s year. There was no GOP heir apparent from the Ike/Nixon establishment and Rocky was the only guy in the field who was a political superstar. But like McCain, conservatives viscerally distrusted Rockefeller and, as such, they ended up selecting a little-known, hard-right, unelectable senator from a sleepy southwestern state over the NY governor.
My guess is that Rudy will sit ’08 out due to his newfound moneymaking prowess and his belief that he can’t win the nod due to social issues and McCain will face off with Allen and Huckabee on his far-right and Romney as sort of the “compassionate conservative” in the race. I think Romney has the best chance of winning the nod as the guy who’s conservative enough for the grassroots voters as well as cosmopolitan enough for the party establishment in the NY-DC corridor. Romney’s sort of the Nat’l Review candidate in the race: a northeastern conservative and intellectual who has red ideas but communicates them in blue language.
The fact remains that the quintissential conservative cannot win in this enviroment of hostility that the left has engendered through the anti-war croud and the occasional leftist agitator. McCain fits because he is a wolf in sheeps clothing. If one is to compare McCain to any particular leader in the history of the nation the one leader that comes to mind would be Dwight Eisenhower. If McCain remains a hawk (which he is) he will trump the no-names of the Party because most Americans need a uniter in this era of global turbulence and not a divider in the case of Mr. Bush. Granted, I voted for the president and am an ardent supporter of his policies however, pragmatism much supplant idealism in the 2008 election and McCain is the essential pragmatist.